Russia/the Netherlands
One of the first memories of my childhood is of my father’s paintings, in which he tried to describe some kind of worldwide catastrophe – anthropogenic, I believe. Grey skies, enormous, deserted, unpopulated spaces. Only tumbledown buildings, still impressive in their greatness, remind us that this wreckage was once a stronghold of an unknown powerful state. Now I understand that my father’s post-apocalyptic fantasies reflected very precisely the public mood of that time. I should mention that my childhood fell during a very complicated period in the history of Russia. The huge utopia called USSR was rapidly collapsing; it was a time of ruins. I believe that my fascination with utopias and dystopias (in my case feminist), and subsequently my little post-apocalyptic world that I try to describe in my artworks, grew out of these memories of my father’s paintings and also reminiscences of my hometown Ufa, the centre of Russia’s chemical and engineering industry situated somewhere in the wilds between Moscow and Siberia.
In my work I’m constantly re-examining my childhood impressions and feelings: The world that I was living in, where fantasies and dreams were as real as reality itself.
I’ve been always captivated by certain architectural images of Soviet and Post-Soviet periods. It was a time of ruins, abandonment, devastation, emptiness and mutation. When I look at photos of deserted Pripyat and Chernobyl, they seem to resemble my home town in the 1980s and 90s. I clearly remember weeds taller than me growing from the cracked pavement in the centre of the city; I remember tumbledown houses, broken windows and ramshackle fences. My interest isn’t architectural but, in a sense, psychotherapeutic. These images are still chasing me. At the time it seemed to me that this atmosphere was alive, that those ruins and houses had organs and circulatory systems. They became a part of nature, wilderness, they were acquiring personality and becoming monsters. Somehow, I always wanted to express this feeling in my work. To tell the story of a little girl, impressed by all of this.
For years I’ve been searching for the right medium to tell my stories. I think that about seven years ago this process crystallised into something real: Books/zines and animation are the two genres that I feel can help me achieve the effects that I wanted to achieve. Sometimes I think of myself as a comic artist who can’t even draw a comic page properly, or an animation artist who doesn’t know how to draw a storyboard. For now, it’s important for me to avoid any linear plots. My books and animations are more of a window to another world. On every page of a zine, in every video you just get a peek of what is going on there; there is no narrative. I like the freedom that those two media give me.
I still consider myself a beginner at animation. My first two shorts The Lake (2011) and The Classroom (2012) were rather an experiment – an attempt to translate my stories into this new medium. My future pieces will definitely involve more complex storytelling. A few of my biggest influences in animation are Suzan Pitt, Bruce Bickford and Priit Pärn.
The Lake was my first experience as an animator. Before that, I had worked on other animations (mostly advertising) as an illustrator, but I had never tried to do it on my own. The Lake was made as a part of my earlier series ‘The Silent Earth’, which included drawings, a book and a few small sculptures. It was supposed to be my personal show in one of Rotterdam’s galleries. I wanted The Lake to be some sort of a looping visual and sound background for the whole show. The whole subject of this series was life after the end of the world, some sort of life after death. So, I wanted to express this feeling in my animation in the most primitive ways possible, because I didn’t have much time to produce this short.
In October 2011, I started to work on my new series ‘The School Diary’. I’ve had this idea for some time. I’ve always been interested in different educational systems. Every authoritarian state needs to control people in all aspects of their life. Of course school is an ideal place where you can teach people what they can be and can do, and what they can’t. School in Russia is a totalitarian system with a clear hierarchy. At least it was when I was growing up. If you’re a student, you’re a lower being, just an extension of the teacher. You don’t have any right to express yourself if it doesn’t meet certain requirements. In my animation The Classroom, I’m trying to compare the school to a dysfunctional family, which are in many ways very similar, but different in terms of scale. It’s also very personal for me because my family was not functional at all.
Both videos were made in collaboration with my husband Timur Shabaev. He’s an architect, but sometimes he helps me with some technical issues I have in my work. For example, in these two films he helped me a lot with the animation process and sound. It’s really nice to have a person at home who is interested in what you’re doing and with whom you can discuss your ideas and problems.
Our approach to the making of the sound was kind of amateurish. For The Lake we just went to the forest and recorded the sounds using a dictaphone. For the second one, I used a fragment of a song from my home country. It’s a song in the Bashkir language, which is the main ethnicity in our region, and I’m also half-Bashkir. The name of the singer is Flura Kildiyarova. I also recorded some sounds with my phone: water flowing, singing, etc. We built everything up after the visual part was ready.
I’ve always wanted to tell stories about women and for women. But in my early (and even not so early) days in Russia, I was told constantly that this kind of art is too ‘girly’, not serious, etc. I didn’t give up, but it took some time to realise that what I am doing is right. I hope that my experience as an artist and my works will help young female artists know that their stories deserve to be told.
References
Krasnova-Shabaeva, Masha. The Lake. Netherlands, 2011. Film.
_____. The Classroom. Netherlands, 2012. Film.